I am a current-affairs columnist and film critic for The New York Post, for which I have covered everything from political conventions to film festivals. I have also contributed reviews and essays to The Wall Street Journal. Follow me on Twitter: @rkylesmith.

You Won't Believe The Stupidity Of The Latest Attack On Walmart

If you thought Mayor Bloomberg’s failed assault on certain large sodas sold in certain kinds of stores was arbitrary and capricious, get ready for a similarly bizarre attempt to punish large retailers.

The latest foolish attack on Walmart is happening, fittingly, in a committee hearing in Washington, D.C., a town that is reminding us all how it is even more obtuse on the local level than on the national. The salvo is called the Large Retailer Accountability Act (LRAA), but just think of it as yet another effort from the DGDP: the Department of Good Deeds Punishment.

For its sin of providing millions of working class Americans with good service, broad selection and low prices, Walmart might as well have painted a (Target-style) bullseye on itself among progressives. Walmart is at last preparing to enter the nation’s capital, with plans well underway for six stores in the District, two of them set to open this year.

Away from the tourist trail, the District still contains some blighted neighborhoods where crime and disorder discourage business and leave residents starved for corporate attention. Walmart has eagerly been reviving desolate corners of the city.

In order to punish this good deed, though, the rebarbative chairman of the D.C. City Council, Phil Mendelson, has been pushing an extraordinary new law that would apply only to large national retailers, with more than $1 billion in sales, who open D.C. stores of greater than 75,000 square feet. Such firms would be required to pay a “living wage” of at least $11.75 an hour to all employees — a 62 percent premium over the federal minimum wage. D.C. already has its own super-minimum wage of $8.25 an hour (set by law at $1 above the federal minimum). So the LRAA is a super-duper minimum wage proposed mainly to punish a single company, which is why wags in the press are calling it the Walmart Living Wage Bill.

You may well ask why Walmart allowed the matter to get this far: When it comes to breaking into northern urban markets, can’t one of America’s largest and greatest companies steamroll a few local-yokel pols? Can’t it grease the right palms? The question is a sad one that presupposes that an honest business must roll up its sleeves and master the kind of dark arts we associate with corruption-riddled Russia or China.

And the answer is: Walmart is way ahead of you. In its D.C. push, which has been underway since at least 2002, Walmart has thoughtfully gone around making the kinds of “donations” to politically-connected figures that wedding guests gave the Corleone family. It put on its payroll the treasurer and campaign manager of a key city council member, Yvette Alexander. It invited neighborhood activists to a focus group that paid $100 and dinner. It spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on local charities like the Greater Washington Urban League and D.C. Hunger Solutions. It arranged a healthy-foods photo-op with Michelle Obama. And it spent in the “eight-figure range” (in the estimate of one journalist) to sponsor a traveling exhibition on the African-American experience that was led by NPR host Tavis Smiley, who proceeded to praise Walmart at the swanky opening-night party amid many influential black leaders. Walmart brass also attended the party, where they availed themselves of the opportunity to announce a gift of 19,000 free tickets to the exhibition to D.C.’s schoolchildren.

You’d think a business that not only plays by the rules (without asking for tax and zoning breaks) but is a beloved icon for the working class and goes to considerable lengths to be a good corporate citizen would be welcomed at least as warmly as, say, a heavily-subsidized sports stadium catering mainly to suburbanites and the well-off. But nevertheless, Mendelson and 11 other members of the City Council arranged for the D.C. City Council’s Committee on Business, Consumer and Regulatory Affairs to meet on March 20 to discuss, banana-republic-style, socking Walmart with the super-duper minimum wage that would inevitably benefit a few at the expense of higher prices for the many.

Committee Chairman Vincent Orange feigned surprise that Walmart didn’t show up to be showered with invective from a restive crowd stocked with labor shills (unionized businesses would be exempt from the law) and other activists: “It’s to Walmart’s detriment for them not to be here, to put on the record themselves and make their case,” he said, forebodingly.

Despite the immense publicity value of phony outrage, and despite D.C.’s place (no. 51 out of 51) on the Chamber of Commerce’s list of the most business-friendly states, Walmart is still favored to prevail in the latest fight: Similar bills were defeated three times since 2005.

And even in statist D.C., there is recognition that an efficient free market, unlike the city’s sclerotic bureaucracies, is a near-miraculous method for lifting people up. “We’ve been praying for food in this neighborhood for about 40 years,” church board member Yvonne Williams told Washington City Paper when Walmart announced its plans to establish an outpost on a parcel of land at New Jersey Avenue and H Street NW that has been vacant since 1990. “God has brought what was supposed to be here—a first-class, progressive thing.”

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Minimum wage jobs are for teens and retirees looking to earn a few bucks. An adult with a family to support needs to have marketable skills to earn a real wage or they should hang their heads in shame. It is NOT up to businesses to supply a worker with enough income to support their family. It is up the EMPLOYEE to earn enough. If that means they are stuck working 2 full time, minimum wage jobs, that is totally on their shoulders. They should have thought that thru long before they had their family.

The Forbes family INHERITED Forbes from Malcolm Forbes, who INHERITED it from founder, B. C. Forbes. Thus, the people at Forbes HAVE NO IDEA what it’s like to actually work for a living! They don’t realize that minimum wage of 1960 is equivalent to $22 today.

Back in the 1960s it was possible for someone working at a department store such as a Walmart to support a FAMILY on that wage. I know because my dad supported us on one income. In the 1970s and 80s it required TWO people to work fulltime jobs. Now, both people must have second jobs in order to afford to raise a family.

Forbes is CLEARLY off-base here. They should take a page from Henry Ford’s playbook and suggest that Walmart double its wages. Henry Ford doubled his workers’ wages (much to the consternation of the people at GM) because he wanted his workers to be able to afford his cars. Don’t believe me? Go look it up yourself!

True but not relevent. Let’s just double every wage. Works for me. But the cost of everything doubles and relatively we are exactly where we started. If you are doing the sasmke job three years fromj now with no increase responsibility or duties why are you entitled to anything more except for inflation?

Sandra, we are tired of “just settling” for what we deserve as human beings, A LIVING WAGE!! The Walton’s and Kroenke’s are profiting immensely off the backs of their employees, the companies they lowball for the chance to get their products in Walmart, and every taxpayer in this country. Stop settling for $#!% and stand up for yourself as a human being that deserves to share in the profit from YOUR labor, not the owners.

Said like a true Marxist. In fact he and Lenin did say it. Oh and so did Hugo Chavez and Castro. You are in good company. It didn’t work all that well of course but move to Cuba and give me areport about a Marxist environment.

Don’t think the pay is high enough? Don’t work there! Why do you think any employer is OBLIGATED to provide what you are calling ‘a living wage’? What makes you so special you think you are entitled to a living wage, whatever that is?

Wallmart pushes the envelope by not providing benefits for their minimum wage workforce. The Walton family rakes in billions while taxpayers provide foodstamps, healthcare and housing assistance for Wallmart employees. This increase may make it so fewer WM employees qualify for government assistance.

My problem with WalMart is that they pay such low wages that a huge portion of their employees need food stamps and medicare just to survive. We may get low prices at the checkout counter, but then we have to pay higher taxes to pay for these programs. According to the motley fool, the Walton family has more assets than the bottom 150,000,000 Americans combined, so basically the Walton family is becoming fabulously wealthy at the taxpayers expense.